Another thing BioWare could have done... Is exactly what EA/Mythic did when they created the "super cluster" and oddly enough nobody lost their names. I believe if you delete a character and try to remake it.. you can't use the name, but no existing characters lost their names. (*edit* This is in regards to what was done with Dark Age of Camelot as I realized some people may not be aware of what I was referring to.) Since Mythic was put under EA/BioWare.. they obviously had direct access to the tech/coding... so this isn't something they had to look at another companies product to find a solution for. At some point when your product is under performing compared to your expectations (EA in this case) it should be a priority to not piss off more customers. When you have direct access to a working solution to avoid that... why not use it.

The answer from my point of view was beyond vague.. it had nothing to do with the issue. As I've seen others say if these new super servers required this.. they should have been renamed. The primary footing people have for being upset is they were already there. I played on The Ebon Hawk from the moment the gates of Early Access opened until I suddenly one day lose my main characters name AND my legacy name. So this character has existed since day one... and I was one of the first people on TEH to even have legacy unlocked (got tons of tells about it when my legacy title popped up). Whatever, these mysterious "factors" are in losing your name are crap (my opinion). Nobody could have started playing before day 1 and nobody had my legacy name before I had it. On top of that I'm still logging into a server named: The Ebon Hawk.. but I'm no longer that guy named.... because of some random factor that no developer can really explain. Obviously if I was logging onto the same server with a new server name.. I could delude myself into thinking somehow.. it was ok to lose my name and my legacy name. The only factor that should decide name ownership is who had the name the longest and who was paying a subscription. If some man/woman is overseas so they don't have levels or /played time but have paid their subscription... they shouldn't lose a name simply because they can't play as much due to being deployed (as an example). However, when you merge servers into a pre-existing servers name... factors no longer apply beyond who owned THAT name on THAT server.

I don't want group content to be changed to solo content. Tho I do solo almost all the time. Why? Well I get more satisfaction knowing I did something myself. Some people get more satisfaction doing things as a group... that's not me. I don't complain that group content exists... its good for various play styles to be supported. I do sell things on the market. In MMO's with better crafting systems I like to craft and play the market that way. Now if I am playing through an area waiting for a quest mob to respawn and someone else comes up. I invite them... because it makes sense, allows us both to progresss and not wait longer and just seems the right thing to do. If you really want to ask a question... maybe you could ponder on why people keep talking about this one paticular MMO in every game they play. They insult it and the player base but do nothing but talk about it constantly. Every single MMO I play I can't leave general chat on because its non stop talk about *that game* I'm not even playing... that might at least be a question worthy of pondering over.

It is likely not an "invis hack" exactly. There was this other game I played and an expansion came out. So the new tier of harvestable resources was selling for a lot. I would be out mining and get this message "node already in use"... but nobody is there. Well my class had a very low damage pbae spell and I was on a pvp server so I cast... and it hits someone. Of course if we were same faction this wouldn't have worked. So I see damage numbers coming up out of the ground. They start moving away and as I watched I could actually see the name of the player just poke out of the ground. Anyway that game had a combat log and I wanted to be sure of spelling so I look to see who I damaged. Then I look up the character and they were like a level 32... in an 80+ zone.. So what were they using? What is commonly known as a Z Axis exploit. There were 4 or 5 players that I would hit with aoe's. All of them were in guilds so it wasn't "for sure" they were farming for RMT as opposed to a player exploiting for the resources they wanted to personally use. I'd report them pretty much every day.. because they were there every day. I never did see them not there... so its pretty much industry policy not to ban accounts. *note* That comment wasn't just based on this one situation. It goes back through many MMO's watching people use speed hacks etc and it was always "under investigation" but the class with no speed that could easily outrun speed classes was never banned (another example). This being my number 1 gripe with every game I play... They have a terms of service and an end user license agreement... enforce them. *edited* to fix some errors and create a few new ones for balance.

I used to copy it around a lot during beta. (have 3 machines I use). Just copy the folder. Then if you want you can run the installer which will update the registry settings (and uninstaller). It might have to update the launcher but unless a patch was released during your copy process you won't have to redownload any of the game data.

For anyone who had applied their code previous to and including the 20th... the billing cycle was set for the 19th of January (as the arliest possible billing cycle). In general... 17 would come before 19. Just saying...

My response would be more along the lines of if you are focusing on how much armor or HP your companion has... is not going to illustrage the issue you are trying to point out. Generally speaking your companions damage reduction and chance to reduce damage (either shield, defense or both) are very low in comparison to a player of the same class. While armor rating would affect one stat in that area.. which relates to damage reduction. Their actual defense chance starts off very low compared to a player (tank). So regardless of what their armor class is.. if they have a very low chance to even make their defense roll they are not going to reduce damage very often. ^^ The main reason I mention this is because its not specific to talents. You can take a player tank at level 14 when they get their shield bonus buff. Put them in the best gear you can find.. then put any companion tank in the best gear you can find. Don't look at armor rating etc just look at the actual chance stats (defense/shield) and you should start to see the obvious. There are other issues but this is me trying to stay relevant to your topic.

Just to add a general response to the Original post. I do a lot of work on my machine and use a 27-inch IPS monitor. My monitor has a native resolution of 2560x1440 and that's what I run TOR at. While running at 2560x1440 I have used 3 different video cards. I had an evga GTX 570 which was slightly faster than a 6950 Sapphire Toxic I had. Which to some extent could be expected. The difference wasn't extreme and I had no paticular issues with the 6950 that I didn't have with the GTX 570. These are the cards I used during beta. The 570 went into my other work machine and I kept the Sapphire 6950 in this one that I game on. Currently I've replaced the 6950 with a 7970. The reason I reply is because yes obviously there are people who have performance issues. I wouldn't have purchased a 7970 if I was having issues with my ATI/AMD card. I would have either SLI's in another 570 or something similar. So its like many things in computer hardware... there are some people having issues but its not an absolute 100% of people using a paticular brand that are having issues. *note to add* Since I didn't state it. I run the game with settings on "high" for everything and have everything enabled (bloom etc).

The main issue I have here is... we have had other MMO's that could display "high" or even "ultra" setting character models if the players system was up to the task. We even have MMO's with an option to limit how many PC models around you are displayed at high quality. Players should have the choice as to what settings they use. If their machine can not handle the settings they choose.. they have this wonderful thing called an "option".... to pick a lower texture resolution.. Or we could have been given this years old option to limit how many models were displayed at high quality... (amazing concept). Some customers probably have gaming rigs that cost thousands of dollars. Those customers machines can handle processing many more calls than those of us with more budget minded systems. Yet the decision made seems to assume all customers have the same system or there was no concept of the word "option". It reminds me of the logic of removing unify chest color. Because some people turned it on and then thought everyone looked the same... well oddly enough they could have simply turned the option off. Instead it was taken away from all customers... Medium textures are a bug and were never an intended setting. Yet that setting was in the game as far back as the playtest of Ord Mantel I took part in... October of 2010... when exactly did you decide it was a bug? Apparantly it was a very low priority "bug" until it was used in the explination of the lack of higher resolutions of textures. The short version of my reaction is.. Why are you making decisions for everyone instead of having the options that are standard for almost all other MMO's? (only talking about the texture related issue here...). The graphic options in this game are so limited it boggles the mind. Give me options.. I like options...

That would be typical. However, when the official statement about Ilum was made it was not the case. "First, action was taken against a number of accounts for what's commonly known as 'gold farming' - or in our case, credit farming. These accounts were found to be exploiting the game in a variety of ways to maximize their credits in order to sell them to other players. Our Terms of Service team took action against these accounts and removed them permanently from the game." and... "Second, a smaller number of accounts were warned or temporarily suspended for exploiting loot containers on Ilum." which also included... "in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced." So in other words... You can exploit in a systematic and repeated manner while unbalancing an entire servers economy... and you will only be warned or temporarily suspended. If you however, happen to possibly be involved in RMT you will be perma banned. I'm not really sure why these are considered two different things. Does it really matter if real money is involved when someone purposely exploits something and destroys a servers economy? Why did they get a slap on the wrist? I don't believe the Terms of Service or End User License Agreement have a clause that specifies its only really really bad if you are involved in RMT. Exploiting is exploiting... they didn't even mention that the first group had any affect on the economy... the second group which they DID say affected server economy some of those people were only warned. So I would easily assume (based on previous action stated in the "official statement" that no real action was taken against those accounts). They should all be permanently removed... exploiting and affecting game economy should not be ok just because you are not spamming a website. I can easily ignore gold spam... if I was given the tools to ignore an entire account I'd never hear from them again. What I am beyond sick of is people who cheat/exploit not having real action taken against their accounts.

Well I signed up for a 6 month during registration. I may cancel that because I am doubtful this game will last that long for me. However, I will likely pay for at least 1 and perhaps 2 months.. which quite honestly is out of boredom. There are 4 games I am currently watching and 3 of them release this year or at least are planned to release this year. I knew that TOR was not my type of game because I am sick of level based games... in fact I'm sick of the entire design philosophy. Ultima Online in its early years was my perfect MMO and I would love for someone to make a game like that... with even more. Currently all games feel like less to me. Crafting used to be pretty good during beta. This changed around June or July maybe it was later.. when they tried "gold" items for a short while. You used to be able to mod about anything you could craft... which gave a huge variety of items to base your appearance on. The decision to change that and make so few crafted items have any use.. should honestly result in someone losing their job and realizing they do not belong in game development. The PvP as many have noted is lackluster and it always was in beta. There is simply no excuse that a decision was made to go with pvp mini games and world pvp that has no point, purpose or incentive. EA which of course owns BioWare always owns: Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online. So the BioWare team had direct access to two currently running MMO's... this is something most companies making "their first MMO" do not have. There was code that could be looked at and some of the best RvR/PvP design in the MMO market (my opinion). Instead of using systems EA had ownership of and had years of testing.. .they decided to basicly take the pvp mini games and "pvp server" mentality of certain other games. The people in charge of that decision should as before.. lose their jobs and realize they have no place in the MMO/game development job segment. There is no excuse for those lackluster decisions. Again earlier in beta each AC had something destinctive about it. Yet again a choice was made.. the wrong choice. So a new build rolled out with totally mirroed classes. Now how exciting could any developer think that was going to be? In DAoC if you played a Wizard in Albion and then rolled an Eld in Hibernea there was some difference in those classes. That was what made it at least somewhat interesting to try that class ... after you had played a wizard. They should have left these things the way they used to be and fixed the few mechanics that had many feedback threads on. Speaking of feedback threads... we had people doing spreadsheets on slicing for 6 months.. maybe more. Tons of feedback yet it seemed to be some shocking suprise when the game launched... Slicing by the way used to give tech materials so it actually did something besides simply provide credits. Yes if you do missions you get schematics but if that's the point it should have been a crew skill like Treasure Hunting and provided rares for cybertech instead of cash boxes around the game world. There were and are a lot of odd design decisions. One thing that really drives me a bit crazy is these narrow arrows on certain planets everyone funnels through. Literally if one person is ahead of you its almost impossible to update some quests... New MMO... 150+ people in the zone... you get the idea. Lots of feedback on paticular choke points during beta. Then again while beta was ongoing we were lucky enough to have a developer in an interview say they didn't need the beta testers or their feedback. That they had found all the issues internally and were fixing them (George Z... I'm sure its floating around as it was put on the beta boards a few hundred times easily). With all that said... I will get my money out of the game. I'm simply saying why I won't be subscribed.. and honestly I've been looking for a game to sub to that will last a year or two. I played UO from 1997 until just into 2003.. and overlapped that with a few years of DAoC. MMO's should not be something you buy and either play for 30 days or sub for 2 months and quit... Even with added development I'm not sure what they can do to bring me back after I leave.. simply because its the foundation that's the problem in my opinion. As opposed to how I viewed a game like Tabula Rasa (an example) which I thought had a great foundation with almost nothing built on it. I respect the amount of time various coders/artists etc put into the game. My feedback isn't meant to be down on that entire teams. The Lead(s) are the ones I am somewhat /boggled at. Obviously this should all just be taken as my opinion. Its not meant to be anyone elses opinion or experience in this subjective material.

I guess I don't see the problem you are talking about. The "level" of the enemy is not going to determine different tactics to fight that enemy. For example there are relatively low level enemies that have abilities you should interrupt because they deal a lot of damage. Yet there are level 50 enemies that don't use any special abilities... Outside of going into group content, raid content or PvP... You should understand how to play your character and use your abilities long before you get to level 50. I could see if you solo all the way to 50 where its possible you won't understand your mechanics in group play... yet even with that example you should know how your character works by 50.

Because slicing was put into the game in the manner it was intended to be used at the time. A company is not going to punish customers for using anything as it was intended to be used. If a customer found a way to make the box not vanish and allow them to slice it over and over... Guess what? They are going to take action on that customer. Back in 1997 in Ultima Online... certain players found that if they used the recall spell to travel across certain zone lines.. That they could trade items and both people in the trade would end up with the item (a dupe). Now obviously people in the game zoned over these lines every day as was intended. Only certain players were using a flaw in the intended gameplay to create an exploitive outcome... and were banned. If you really can't comprehend that's what they took action against was this same type of mechanic... well I really don't know what to say (people were exploiting which is why in one of the various remarks it was described as not being normal game play. I will agree that BioWare could word things much better than they do). People in general pretty much have a grasp of how the mechanics are supposed to work. Which is exactly why a certain number of people were doing this same action over and over... instead of playing the game like everyone else. Or are we really supposed to believe they just thought the design intention of the game was to skip 30 levels (or whatever relative number) of planets... to zoom to Ilum and loot these containers for hours every day? The only issue from my point of view.. is that this relatively small number of accounts were not permanently removed from the game as they should have been (in my opinion). I've been playing MMO's for longer than I would like to admit.. and to be honest I am sick of people who cheat... and the one thing I would really like is for them to be removed instead of getting a slap on the wrist. "It was just an accident I kept looting those containers for 15 hours a day over the last 10 days..." *note: this is just an example I made up to illustrate a point and is not intended to accurately protray someone who was looting those containers for hours a day every day* seriously? At least they were just generating large numbers of credits that affected the games economy and not trying to RMT them.

The Zash fight was pretty rough on my Assassin. I managed to get it done with just my companion... but it took a few runs and some thought.

Off the top of my head... Options that were in graphics settings and removed without explination. Such as draw distance... You know the thing you can set farther when your machine can handle it so you don't see the grass grow at your feet. Match color to chest... the explination for removal was that people who turned it on through everyone looked the same... because they couldn't turn it off? and be different if they wanted to? I used to be able to search items by name on the GTN. I think that was back around June/July and it worked perfectly. It was removed without explination... the current implementation doesn't work from what I can see. Various quest chains that used to exist and had voice acting etc... removed without explination... There used to be the Kaggath Quest in DK and there was a quest that sent you to another camp (before the kubaz quest one). The aliens there... which contained 2 or 3 quests... just one day *poof* gone... Oh and then there was the fact that back around that time maybe a little earlier... Advanced Classes were actually somewhat unique and not just total mirrors... That was pretty awesome. This was back when Commando/Merc had defensive screens (damage shields).. I don't remember if Vanguard/Powertech had them.. but I don't think so. Only Trooper had the ammo buff (BH needed a bit of work but it was "cooler" when they were a bit more unique). That's just what I remember off hand.. Then there was when most all crafted items and some world drops had mod slots... So you had this vast array of "looks" to choose from. As opposed to the rather limited number of items with mod slots now. Of course then you'd have to think about how Armstech made crystals as well so armstech could make crystals for "guns" and artifice made them for force users. Cybertech only made mods for non force users and Artifice made all the force ones. Instead of having Cybertech make all the armor mods... and "mods" then moving enhancements to artifice... ^^ The old system as I said had a far greater number of options for gear to use and mod. As well as the fact that force users could stay inside force based crafts for their mods. As well as non force users being able to stay in their related crafts... which.. made sense. I'm not explaining some of that very well I'm sure... but it all starts to meld together over time... so those are some things I miss from beta. *edit to add* Oh and ... hoods worked on Twi'lek. Personally I thought it looked cool having their lekku come out the side. This is one thing I really don't understand... If someone doesn't like it they could have simply turned off the head slot. Instead that option is forced on the user.. Options are good... (my opinion)